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Virtualmin is constantly being developed and gaining ever useful features, and for a while now has featured two-factor authentication which is great, although what happens if you get locked out of your system? As long as you have SSH or console access then you can follow the steps below to easily get back in.

Disabling two-factor authentication for a single user

Get root SSH or console access

Edit the file /etc/webmin/miniserv.users, comment out the current line for the user then create a fresh copy above it

Remove any mention of “totp” and the long string of characters near the end and save, for example your file should now look like the following:

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Any good web host will secure the contents of website directories which don’t have an index page by not allowing the files or folders to be listed, instead you’ll get a 403 error page saying access is forbidden. Whilst this is good in practice, sometimes you might actually need to list the contents – and its simple to enable on an Apache web server – add one line to your .htaccess file and you’re done!

How it’s done

Options +Indexes

Notes

If you have access you can edit your web server configuration and make it global

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I recently bought 2 Turnigy Nitro RC cars to have a little fun with, whilst being fully aware of them having a problem with the starter mechanism I hoped that HobbyKing would have resolved them by now, but unfortunately not.

I bought a Truggy for £50 and a Buggy for £70 and managed to start them both twice before the pull starter began to slip. I took the buggy engine apart and found no obvious problems, but there was a lot of oily residue covering pretty much everything, even the pull starters chord and this seemed to be the reason it was slipping.

Searching online at the HobbyKing website I found various posts about replacing different engine parts but the most promising said that a Graupner 92600.117A back plate was the ultimate solution and stops the oily residue from the fuel seeping everywhere.

All in all it looks like a design flaw with the engine, but two new back plates are on their way from Germany, £30 inc postage and should be here in a few weeks.

Update 16/08/2015 –

The new back plates fits nicely and the engines have both turned over flawlessly since. The pictures below show briefly how it was done to the buggy engine, the same steps were repeated for the truggy engine too.

The engine taken off the car

The original back plate

A shot inside of the engine

After the new back plate was fitted

After the engine was back in the car

A video will be attached soon showing the cars in action.

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I’ve been experimenting for a while with different ways to stream live to the Internet from webcams, IP cameras and capture cards for the Coop Cam project, here is a basic guide on how to setup a simple live stream using a basic webcam.

What is required?

You will need a couple of things, including:

A computer with a webcam

An Internet connection with decent upload speed

Router access to port forward

Software

To create the stream we will use a free piece of opensource software called Yawcam, you can download it directly from here or learn more about the software here.

Installation is pretty simple, download and launch the installer then follow the on screen instructions.

Configuration

After the installation has finished open your newly installed software, you will see a screen like below:

The first thing we need to do is set the stream type, to do this go to Settings > Edit Settings…

Under Output select Stream and change the Stream type to MJPEG and hit OK

Next we need to select your webcam, head to Settings > Device > Change to and select your webcam from the list

Finally, back on the main screen hit enable on the Stream option – we are ready to go!

Previewing your stream

If everything is configured correctly you should see your webcam displayed live.

Here is my example of Spirit our pet quail:

What next?

The next thing you need to do is configure port forwarding in your router to allow people to connect in and view your stream. I can’t really go into specific detail as there are many different types of router with different configuration options but basically what you want to do is forward port 8081 to your computer so anyone that connects to your-public-ip:8081/video.mjpg can see your stream.

You will also want to make sure that your computer has a static IP address or DHCP reservation to make sure the local IP address doesn’t change.

If you need help with that part let me know and I’ll give you a hand.

Will my Internet connection be able to cope?

For added security and to take the strain off your Internet connection I can relay your stream via Coop Cam’s powerful relay servers. They are able to take the single stream from your camera and amplify it allowing hundreds of users to connect at once.

The upside to this is that you will only have one connection being uploaded to the relay server, the server then handles everything else and even hides your public IP address – If you would like to know more please get in touch.

Notes

If you want Yawcam to start streaming automatically when you login to your computer then head to Settings > Edit Settings… > Startup and tick Start Stream output

You can check that port forwarding has been setup correctly by using the NerdTools Port Scanner, if it isn’t working double check your firewall settings

If your Internet connection has a dynamic IP address you’ll want to look into a Dynamic DNS service

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I used to be a customer of popular cloud backup service Livedrive. The upload and download speeds were nothing to shout about and one annoyance was having to pay extra to add a NAS drive to your account, but there is a workaround!

How so?

All you need to do is add a symbolic link to your NAS drive from your computer. Think of a symbolic link as a fancy shortcut, the only difference being it masks the destination instead of taking you straight there – you’ll see what I mean when you read on.

Imagine you have a Windows computer with your NAS drive with the root of the drive already mapped to Z:, you have a folder on your NAS called MyFiles and would be able to browse to Z:\MyFiles to see whatever is stored there. Next imagine we have a folder called C:\Backup which is already uploading to your Livedrive account, using the following command we will make C:\Backup\MyFiles lead to your NAS and in turn be included with your Livedrive backup.

mklink /d "C:\Backup\MyFiles" "Z:\MyFiles"

For me, this worked absolutely fine and I had a couple of TB uploaded without ever being caught out. I’ve since jumped ship to Amazon Drive, whilst it is more expensive per year I’ve got it running from multiple computers and the upload and download speed always tops out my connection, so I can’t complain!

Notes

Use the above guide at your own risk – I won’t be held liable if anything happens to your Livedrive account, files or anything else because of this!

This doesn’t work with Dropbox or Google Drive – sorry

You only need to run the command once, after that the link will be remembered

To remove the link just delete it as you would any other file or folder

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The Internet is an amazing place where we can expand our knowledge – or – just look pictures of animals with funny captions, but have you ever wondered to yourself who owns that domain, who took the time to build that amazing website, see if a business is legit or maybe you just want to learn a new nerdy skill?

A domain name can be registered by anyone so long as its available and not registered to anyone else, and can be bought at anytime through hundreds, thousands or maybe millions of companies known as domain registrars. The job of a domain registrar is to take money and convert it into domain registrations as they are essentially the middle men between the domain registries (the top dogs of the domain world, the owners of the bit after the dot) and ourselves.

When a domain is registered, regardless of the registrar used, contact details will always need to be provided. These details form what’s known as the legal registrant and can be either a company or an individual who will legally own the name for however long it has been registered for.

That’s great but what next? Well here comes the juicy bit! All that information is kept in a global database known as the WHOIS database (pronounced “who is”) which is free to browse and will give an insight into any domain registration.

Querying WHOIS

The following guide will show you step by step how to query the WHOIS database for free with no special software required. To keep things simple I will be using a website that I created which has a built in WHOIS tool.

Once the website loads you’ll see a box where it asks you to enter a domain name, enter the domain which you would like to query and press Enter or the “Let’s do this! >” button

After a few seconds you’ll be redirected to a new page that shows the domain details in a similar format to one shown below:

As you can see from the screenshot above a lot of information is returned, so much that it doesn’t all fit on screen without scrolling but once you read through you will easily see who owns the domain, when it was registered, when it expires and other useful information

Notes

In the example above you can see no “Registrant’s address” is returned, this is because its a .UK domain and Nominet (the registry behind all .UK domains) allow the address to be hidden for any non-trading individuals, but with domains such as .COM, .NET, .ORG the information will always be available

Depending on the domain name things may look a little different to the one in the example

Any changes to a domains details can take up to 24 hours to show so things may not always be accurate

There are strict terms that need to be followed when it comes to using the information returned from a lookup and these can be found usually be found at the bottom – It’s not shown in the screenshot as it was so big, to see them click here and scroll down

Sometimes registrars offer a privacy package that will hide the registrants contact information and replace it with the registrars instead, if you see a domain like this that’s trading as a business stay well away as it could be up to no good!

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There may come a time in your nerdy life where you want your computer to automatically log in at boot or whenever anybody signs out, this can be especially useful if you are running software that needs a user to be constantly logged in.

For example, I run CCTV software on my computer via a user called Console, the software displays live camera feeds on a second screen at my desk, the same signal is fed via a splitter through network cables eventually reaching various screens dotted around my house.

The setup requires my Console user to be constantly logged in, be it when the system boots or after I have finished checking my emails or being nerdy.

It is fairly straight forward to get going, in my case on Windows 10 Pro I ran the built-in netplwiz(.exe) utility and added one string value to the registry.

Part 1: Configuring automatic login at boot

Run netplwiz(.exe) and uncheck the box saying Users must enter a username and password to use this computer.

Press OK then enter the username and password you want the computer to automatically login as and press OK again

That’s the first part completed, so now whenever you boot your computer it will automatically sign in as the user account you have set.

Part 2: Configure automatic login when signing out/switching user

The next part involves adding a regsitry key with a string value, once this was done I found it worked straight away without having to reboot my machine.

Open regedit(.exe) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Right click on Winlogon and select New > String Value

For the value name enter ForceAutoLogon, double click the line you just added and enter the value date to 1

That’s it! Now when you sign out it will automatically sign back in to the user account set in first step.

Notes

If you want to log in as a different user, hold the shift key whilst locking your account, you’ll then see the normal Windows login screen

You can do step 1 via the registry if you want, but why over complicate things!